I don't want to be overly critical of this grinder. It has some very strong points that I will get to later, but it is such a close copy of a Mazzer Super Jolly that it is hard not to compare the two. If you are going to copy a grinder, an SJ is a good one to copy, and the result, while not original, could be very good.

The doser is the exception. Mazzer dosers are not all that. They are sturdy and I can confirm that they can take a beating and still work just fine. But they are just OK dosers. They don't sweep super clean. Often they spray grinds all over the place. The Elvinator from Espresso Parts was the best addition I made to mine. So it is either disappointing or comical that the HC-600 doser is a copy of the Mazzer dosers, faults and all. It has the same mediocre sweep and throws even wider to the left.

The Good - The larger lens on my HC-600 is an improvement over the Mazzer doser's little windows. I like big lens, but I also like that the bulk of the body is still mental. I prefer this to the dosers that are all lens.

The Bad - It doesn't sweep clean. It throws wide to the left. The action is not as smooth as the Mazzer doser it mimics. The handle is long, straight, round, thick. It is made to be grasped in your hand, which works OK if you are actually dosing with the doser, but it makes it hard to move with your finger tips, and it makes the throw of the arm very long, which does not facilitate thwacking away as so many of us do. This "issue" is compounded by the less than silky arm movement.

The ? - The lens is thinner than those I have encountered elsewhere. This makes it shorter lived and/or cheaper to replace. Good or bad...I don't know.

I was really excited when I noticed that one of the few things on this grinder that is different from a Mazzer Super Jolly is the burr outlet. It's angled and feeds from the right to the left! OMG! It is even off center!

As far as commercial use goes, this isn't a detail that would even be noticed. However, few home users use the doser as it was intended, and so getting the grounds from the burrs into the doser with minimal retenion suddenly becomes a critical aspect of a grinder's design. The grinds usually don't exit the burr chamber fast enough to propel them all the way out into the doser, which results in build up in the chute. The grinds sort of ooze out in a clumpy chute shaped snake. A smaller chute means less natural retention but can be difficult to sweep clean. A deeper chute can make sweeping impossible. A chute that involves a plastic or rubber part also makes sweeping more difficult. I have experimented with a bunch of 64mm flat burrs, and had yet to find anything that worked better than a Mazzer's simple, straight, relatively short, all metal outlet....

This one is better. The grinds exit the chute at a fast and steady rate. I would characterize it as faster and cleaner than a Super Jolly, but not as fast and clean as a Major. It has by far the best grounds-exiting-the-burr-chamber-outlet performance that I have seen on a 64mm commercial flat burr grinder.

I will try to post a video on youtube as soon as I get this set up for daily use.

Please, no one - and especially the many good contributors to this thread whom I respect - take any personal insult or judgment from what I will say here; but is anyone going to bring up the ethical issue of copying intellectual property with respect to this rather transparent knock-off of a Mazzer design and product?

Last spring, the CG community put itself solidly in Mark Hellweg's camp when Melitta and Hario both copied his Clive Stand - obviously and blatantly - and showed it for release at SCAA in Houston.

Then last summer, it was painful to see vendors who previously trashed (or just scoffed as "nothing new") Vince Fidele's line of VST baskets - then quickly jump on the bandwagon with their own versions, borrowing VST's marketing, trade names and writing almost line-for-line.

Unlike smaller businesses such as Clive Coffee or VST trying to fight off design thievery, Mazzer's bottom line is unlikely to be threatened by Hey-Cafe's Chinese SJ knock-offs. Regardless, as an ethical community in which we heap deserved praise on the OEs and Jeff Pentels and Hellwegs and Chrisses and Baratzas and many other vendors for their stand-up integrity, we all owe back enough to respect their hard work and intellectual property. It is only fitting that we rise to that standard in return and buy our products from those who sweated to invent, design and refine them - not from the copycats who knock them off.

Please, no one - and especially the many good contributors to this thread whom I respect - take any personal insult or judgment from what I will say here; but is anyone going to bring up the ethical issue of copying intellectual property with respect to this rather transparent knock-off of a Mazzer design and product?

Last spring, the CG community put itself solidly in Mark Hellweg's camp when Melitta and Hario both copied his Clive Stand - obviously and blatantly - and showed it for release at SCAA in Houston.

Then last summer, it was painful to see vendors who previously trashed (or just scoffed as "nothing new") Vince Fidele's line of VST baskets - then quickly jump on the bandwagon with their own versions, borrowing VST's marketing, trade names and writing almost line-for-line.

Unlike smaller businesses such as Clive Coffee or VST trying to fight off design thievery, Mazzer's bottom line is unlikely to be threatened by Hey-Cafe's Chinese SJ knock-offs. Regardless, as an ethical community in which we heap deserved praise on the OEs and Jeff Pentels and Hellwegs and Chrisses and Baratzas and many other vendors for their stand-up integrity, we all owe back enough to respect their hard work and intellectual property. It is only fitting that we rise to that standard in return and buy our products from those who sweated to invent, design and refine them - not from the copycats who knock them off.

Yes excellent points. I too have suffered the clones which sucks big time. I can't tell you how many copies of the Corner Mat I invented that are in the market, or the tamp stand, or the custom tamper we made for a certain machine company that they now buy the copy, or the classic knockbox or the tubbi etc.....I could go on for days on this. A lot of it are by companies who should know better. No idea how they can look in the mirror everyday.

Back to the HC600 I met them about 6 years ago. The guy is from Europe who makes them who happens to live in Shanghai. It's a decent grinder but like you I wish they had come up with something new. The asthetic design cost is trivial when you think of the tooling fees involved. To go that immense expense and rehash something seems a bit silly. Ilan the owner is very talented, even the burrs they made in-house. I told them all this 6 years ago and I think they have their own designs now. I haven't kept in touch with them but hear a few things through mutual friends.

There's another SJ clone in Taiwan I think. Fiamma??? A slightly squarer shape.

Thanks Paul - and you bring up a huge point, being that supporting the originators is to our own advantage anyway. The specialty coffee industry is driven by the ideas and inventions of a constellation of individuals and small companies. If their experiences are like the ones you relate, and everything they do gets ripped off, why would they bother working to create further contributions and move us forward? Where would the next Kone or Speedster or OE dosing funnel (or the last Lambro for that matter) come from?

So it's also in our self-interest: if buyers don't respect the originators, there won't be any, and coffee's progress will grind (in this case literally) to a halt.

(I think this is a completely valid issue. When thinking about the work of individuals such as Doug and Barb as OE, people who have give a major part of themselves to a pursuit that we all value, people who are part of our community in both the small and large sense, nothing is more important than for us wield our influence as paying consumers responsibly.

As far as this generation of the HC-600 is concerned, I think something else Paul said is more salient:

Paul_Pratt Said:

Back to the HC600 I met them about 6 years ago. The guy is from Europe who makes them who happens to live in Shanghai. It's a decent grinder but like you I wish they had come up with something new. The asthetic design cost is trivial when you think of the tooling fees involved. To go that immense expense and rehash something seems a bit silly. Ilan the owner is very talented, even the burrs they made in-house. I told them all this 6 years ago and I think they have their own designs now.

I'm not in a position to judge the legality or ethical nature of the similarities between this grinder and a Super Jolly. I certainly don't find it surprising that something like this would happen, for better or worse. I have my own opinion of the SJ design as it relates to some of the other grinders in its class, and it is not consistently complimentary. A lack of inovation would be, I think in case at hand, the most disappointing assessment of this grinder. There are small points of improvement present such as the burr outlet and the adjustment collar. If the newer HC-600 proves to be a more original/adventurous design I think that would lend credence to Ilan's claim that cribbing from the SJ was a practical starting point (Click Here (www.home-barista.com)).

It is easy to jump on the idea of this being a "Chinese Knock Off", but that is something that I'm trying to move past. It is not easy to launch a business, and it would be unfortunate if we erroneously ascribed negative motives to an earnest attempt to build something new (well, maybe on the second go round in the case of the HC-600).

The patents on the Mazzer SJ doser expired a long time ago, it would appear and it's "old skool" anyway. Here in the US the HC600 is not lighting up any fires, and Mazzer is still king of the heap. Copying a new product from a competitor that's not trademarked is another matter. The distributors who stock Cafelat knockoffs probably are aware, what about them? Are end customers even aware the product is a knockoff?

Cafelat and OE continue to come out with new and innovative products that create excitement and sales. A good way to stay ahead of the game.

So I finally found the time to mess with this grinder some more and made some videos of it doing its thing. This is one of the grounds from a very large single dose exiting the burrs through the off-center angles outlet. As I mentioned before, I think that design of this outlet are what result in a better flow of grounds more similar to a Major than an SJ. There really doesn't seem to be this huge build up in the chute.

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